From the Pit

This post is for those of you in the hard times. It's for those days when the hardest thing you do all day is breathe. It's for those of you who find yourselves falling. You're not alone. And most of us are more afraid of falling than hitting rock bottom. Here's what I offer, take it for what you will:

1. Be honest. Admit that you're falling. Not necessarily to anyone else, but to yourself. To your God. Acknowledge the place you're in and what's going on. No need to trace it back to its roots, although in some situations, that might come naturally. One of the hardest things about falling is the loss of control. When you admit what's going on, you assert some dominance over it. This is no strange thing - you know what's going on. You're falling. It is what it is. Repeat to yourself over and over until falling is just a thing. It happens. The sun rises and sets. The tides move in and out. Mist rises and rain falls. Things fall. You fall. Recognize it. Acknowledge it. Affirm it. This happens.

2. Don't look down. Our first instinct when we're falling is to look down. We want to see how far we have to go, what we're going to hit, whether there's any landing at all. If you're falling, don't look down. You will see only darkness. You will see no end, no comfort. No landing. The pit looks bottomless in the dark. Overwhelming. You'll start to wonder all sorts of things about yourself, about your God. And now is not the time. There is a very good place for all of that, but right now, if you're falling, you don't need more questions. What you need right now are answers, and if not answers, then hope. 

If you can't look up, hold steady. Fix your eyes on something. And hold out your hand. Either God will send someone to take it or He will take it Himself. Hold out your empty, trembling hand. If that's the least you can do, at least do that much.

3. Don't stop talking. In dark times, it's easy to lose track of your voice. Suddenly, it's the darkness that has the only right to speak and whatever trouble says, goes. Your inner dialogue isn't yours any more, and your outer dialogue is sure to follow. If you can find the strength to speak at all once your voice has been quieted. Keep talking. Think out loud. Even if you don't physically speak, write. Even if no one will ever read your words, keep writing. String together as many honest words as you can until you can't see through the tears any more, and then cry out to God. You're falling. You're not a victim. This is not passively happening to sort of you - you're actively involved in the process. That's what step 2 is all about: engaging the fall so you're present to it. When you're present to it, you have the chance to deal with it from your real self.

4. Don't hurt yourself. These are the easiest times to think, "Oh, what does it matter?" You know you're falling and you want whatever seems to help before you hit bottom and shatter into a million little pieces. You're feeling every bit of the hurt, and it's hard. It sucks. I'm sorry. But when you turn your hurt on yourself, you set yourself up for the break. Fall tender - in honesty, in hope, in voice - and you may find it's not such a hard landing after all. It will still hurt. It will still sting. But bones break; flesh only bruises. Let yourself feel the hurt and don't mask it with pain; you will soften your heart for impact. It's worth it. Trust me.

5. Don't disengage. The fall is real. The battle is real. Most of us, if we're honest, we're falling toward a moment. One moment when something inside of us is going to surface and we'll be standing face-to-face with a part of ourselves we never hoped we'd have to deal with. Our questions, our insecurities, our wounds...something about us is about to come out and it doesn't feel like we're ready. We don't know how to deal with it. We don't want to deal with it. It's easy to think, "I'll deal with this later, when I'm more ready." You're afraid. Admit it, you're scared. But here's the hard truth: you will never be less afraid than you are right now. You won't. There's not a 'better time' to deal with things. There's not a good day for darkness. You can't schedule it in when you're feeling stronger. You are scared now. You will always be scared. The question is - does fear stop you?

I don't know about you, but I've live enough of my life with fear stopping me to decide I don't want to do it any more. Which means, I guess, that I want to do the dark days with style. These are kind of the steps to doing that.

From being honest, I gain confidence. Darkness isn't about me; it happens to everybody. I'm not special. I'm not targeted. I might even be normal. This gives me a chance to be a human among humans, and a man before God. That's pretty cool, even when it feels like it sucks.

From not looking down, I gain hope. And if I'm lucky, maybe I gain a friend, or a community. Darkness isn't all I have to look forward to. I don't have to look at it at all. There are other things going on. More is happening here than my falling. If I don't look at the darkness, I can see that. Clearly. And if I hold out a hand, someone takes it. Now, it's not just me. I'm not alone. That's an incredible blessing.

From talking, I gain a voice. I get to speak into my darkness; it does not speak into me. I get to decide what gets said and what gets quieted. I get to decide what the truth is. That's powerful. The truth is I am falling, but that's not the whole truth. There's always something else at play. When I gain my voice, I get to say what that is.

From staying tender, I invite my brokenness. I think too many of us are afraid of brokenness. We're afraid to be wounded. That's understandable, but there is beauty in brokenness. That's where we start to crack and all the good stuff starts to pour in. Good stuff like mercy. And faith. And trust. And hope. And peace. And redemption. Good stuff like God. If you live your life whole as a man, there's no place for God to come in. Open up a few cracks, and there He is to mend your wounded flesh. It's beautiful, and, although I spent a lot of years fighting this very thing, I wouldn't trade brokenness for all the world. 

From staying engaged, I get to set my time. I decide that the time is now. I decide there's no turning back. I decide I'm doing this thing, whatever this thing happens to be. It's not happening to me; I am doing it. I am not falling; I stepped off the ledge. I took one bold, courageous, fearful step toward beautiful and it is happening.

You're not falling; you've stepped off the ledge. Take one bold, courageous, fearful step toward beautiful.

Oh, and dark days rarely come by the ones. They also cover many dark nights. Give yourself to God every night. Open your hands and let go. You'll sleep better.

Eternity

Time is a funny thing, but so is eternity. Somewhere, somehow, we've settled on the idea that eternity begins the day we die and stretches on forever before us. We just have to get there.

We're living toward eternity without realizing that eternity is already in us.

Eternity is today; it is now. In a world marked by time, we already have forever. We're already living it. It happens when we get lost in a good story. It happens when we lose ourselves in a moment. In fact, what I suggested yesterday about counting our lives in moments and breaths? That is the essence of eternity. That's what it means to live timeless.

It's dangerous thinking, to forget this eternity. We think today shall pass away, that it's just temporary. That everything we do today or don't do today will be inconsequential tomorrow. Or in some future tomorrow when eternity begins. But when you realize this is already eternal, you understand what today means - today is part of forever. Today is one more mark on the eternal. Today is telling the story we think we're only waiting to get to. 

Kind of changes the way you think about today, doesn't it?

But it's not just that. Perhaps the most dangerous thinking we have in relation to eternity is thinking it begins with us at all. We take eternity as our personal promise, believing it began with our first breath. Believing that we have from our first moment on into forever. But that's not the case.

Eternity gives us everything not from our first moment, but from the first moment. All the way from In the beginning, there was you. Before time began, you were formed in the imagination of God. Before we ever had a concept of such a thing as forever, we had forever within us. From the outset of forever, you were set aside for this measure of time - the one you can mark in hours and days.

That's powerful. Everything that has ever been is woven into the fabric of you. From the very first breath of God, it's all come to bring you to this time, to this place. You were created...to pull from the book of Esther...for such a time as this, with everything that came before wrapped into all that is as you move toward all that will be.

There are so many implications of this; it would take forever to spell them all out for you. But perhaps this gives your heart something to think about, your mind something to ponder. Eternity is given us for such a time as this.

What does that say about your time?

Time

Time is a funny thing, isn't it? It's the one thing we all have in common.

Think about it. As different peoples, we sort of choose what is important to us. How we will communicate. How we will live. The way we will respond to each other and to our natural surroundings. Even everyone who speaks English doesn't speak the same English. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of languages and tongues all around the world, each with their own vernacular, their own vocabularies, their own characters. Some are written; some never are.

There are people who build homes on top of mountains while others build homes in mountains. Some that live by the ocean; others that live in the ocean, raising their homes on stilts. Some who live in homes like we know. Some who live in cardboard boxes. Some who have just a shaky set of a couple of walls to divide their domicile from another. Some who have no home at all but rather the entirety of space.

There are cultures that place high value on individual achievement. There are some that are more tuned to communal cohesion.

We have different value systems, both morally and monetarily. In the States, we pay in dollars. In Britain, in pounds. Euros. Rupees. Yen. Goat's milk. 

All these decisions, millions of them, that we make about who we are and how we will live as a people...and no one has more than 24 hours in a day. Nobody. For those peoples who tell time, it's 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds. It's one system. Worldwide. Across all peoples.

Have you ever really thought about this?

Even in those cultures that do not track time, men still number their days. They know they have only from sunrise to sunrise, one full mark of time. One day. They know the number of days of their lives; they celebrate birthdays, or what passes for them. They know who is the eldest, who is the youngest.

Time is the thread that ties us all together. None of us has more of it than anyone else. A day is a day, an hour is an hour, a minute is a minute. A second is a second.

We cannot change time in our story by changing the way we talk about it. We cannot change time in our story by changing the way we live in it. We cannot change time in our story by changing the emphasis we place on it. We cannot change time in our story by changing the value we associate with it. Time...is beyond us.

Which is maybe why it's so easy to worry about such a thing as time. It's the one thing we have but can never really have. It is given to us, but it is never ours. We can touch it, but we can never hold it. Time is fleeting. Just as the seconds tick by, we feel it ticking away and we always wonder if we're going to have enough. Time is the one place where we are forced to rely on something greater than ourselves. It's why we worry about it, but it's also why we agree on it. We have no input; time is what it is regardless of man.

Time is what it is in reverence of God. It is He who created the sun and the moon, the earth on its axis, the rate of its rotation. It is God who declared how long it would take the earth to both rotate and revolve, the measure of a day and the measure of a year. It is God who has numbered our years, God who counts our days. It is God who controls time, although ironically, He doesn't need to.

For it is God who has eternity. And eternity is not counted in seconds or minutes or hours. Eternity is counted in moments, in breaths.

Time presses in on us. It's the one thing we can all seem to agree on. But even though time is greater than us, there is something greater than time: eternity. Eternity is given us for the glory of God.

Let us count our years in moments. Let us number our days in breaths. 

Grace Hole

You've no doubt heard about the wormhole - a completely hypothetical warp in the time-space continuum which, if ever actually found, creates a shortcut across space and time.

I'm not a physicist (although I do watch The Big Bang Theory), so I can't speak to all that time-space stuff in the scientific sense. But I can tell you without a doubt that there is a ripple in the universe.

It's called grace.

Grace always comes unexpected. It has to, or it can't be grace. Grace is that moment when you get the thing you least deserve, that thing you would never dare hope for. It's different than mercy, which says you do not get what's coming to you. But it's also different than a reward for faithfulness. You would never hope for God's grace. You couldn't even know what to hope for. Then it shows up, and you're like...whoa. 

I've had a lot of grace moments in my life, particularly as of late. And the thing about grace that I've noticed is this - it is a profound disruption of the time-space continuum. It's an aberration from the way the world works.

The world says this life is labor, that I have to work my way toward anything my heart could ever desire. There's fault in that, simply in that what my heart needs, it may never comprehend enough to desire. That is, I can't even know what to desire, and that's where grace comes in. I could work my way toward the greatest things in the universe, toward the most intimate places of Creation, inch my way toward eternity...and never get close enough to even vaguely understand such things. But by grace, I am sucked in. I am drawn right toward these things by a powerful force. My movement is accelerated. 

I'm getting there.

The world says there's a linear progression to everything, that things move along in a straight line. First yesterday, then today, and eventually tomorrow. First there, then here, then way beyond here. The past, then the present, then the future. First the beginning, then the middle, and then the end.

But grace says, "In the beginning..." In the beginning, He created the end. In the beginning, He ordained the middle. In the beginning was the first and the last. As grace draws us into that, it takes us back to the original Creation and into the promised Paradise at the same time. Grace pulls us from the middle and takes us to both the beginning and the end. 

You can't do that without a grace hole somewhere in this universe. 

No man has ever seen a wormhole. No one's discovered one, at least not that we know of. (In theory, I suppose, since it's all theory anyway, a man who discovered a wormhole could be sucked into it and disappear into the time-space continuum and thus, never be able to tell us about his wormhole.) No man knows whether this ripple in the universe actually exists or whether it's just fun to think about.

But I know about grace. It's absolutely real. And I know where the grace hole is, the place where all of this both begins and ends, the place where powerful forces begin to swirl, the place that takes us from here to there and covers the distance of space and time in an instant. Yes, I know where the grace hole is.

There are three of them: one in His right hand, one in His left, and one in His feet.

Something New

Yesterday, I told you the transformation of our hearts and minds has to start with new wine. Today, I'll tell you why.

There are two basic theories on change. The first is that as you change, you will seek better things to surround you. The second is that as things change, you will seek a better self to be worthy.

Most of us, when we make changes in ourselves, make them in the negative. That is, we decide we're not going to do something any more or we're not going to be a certain way. That's...almost worse than whatever broken thing you're doing. Why? Because there are a whole lot of things you could besides lie, but they wouldn't necessarily be better things. You could sulk. That's not lying. You could get angry. That's not lying either. You could stay silent. Still, not lying. When we decide to change our lives in the negative, we start seeking out anything that's not the thing. So we're not necessarily making our lives better; we're just changing them.

What's the point? It's such a waste.

But even if you do this nobly, you're setting yourself up for failure. Because you've added an extra step. You can change yourself all you want, but it's not until you get into circumstances that your new self is revealed...or not. You can decide you're going to do x, y, and z but when the opportunity comes along, you either become a person who does x, y, and z or you don't. In essence, you're setting yourself up to make the decision twice and as new it is it, it's really hard to do that. You first have to sit within yourself and decide, "I am a person who..." doesn't lie, let's say. That's well and good to decide that, but you don't truly decide that until you are in a position to lie and still choose not to. See? You decide, but you have to decide again when it matters.

A measure of this is always true, of course. In any significant season of change in my life, whether working from the inside out or the outside in, I have a period in which I am entirely different in the privacy of my den than I am in the public of...anywhere. Even so much as venturing outside to talk to a neighbor, and I realize I am not the woman I thought five minutes ago that I was finally becoming. Change takes time.

When we take our new wine first, though, it's a little easier. For no other reason than that it gives us something to work toward. No longer are we arbitrarily looking to make a change. No longer is it abstract that we want to be doing something different or better in our lives. Now, we have an idea. We want to live a life in harmony with the new stuff that's happening. The very good, very exciting new stuff that's going on all around us. We want to make changes in our life that matches the new wine.

I think ladies understand this in a beauty sense. Ladies - we go and get a new haircut, for no other reason than that we're sick of the old one. The stylist works her magic, and we look in the mirror and see a new woman staring back at us. All of a sudden, we want to live the kind of life that rocks that hair!

Men may have a similar experience when, say, they get a new man cave. They've finally talked their wife into giving up that corner of the basement, and now...it's awesome. All of a sudden, he becomes a man who values the camaraderie of other men, who seeks out opportunities to throw a good game party.

Any change is hard work. But changing from the inside-out is harder. Because it comes from something deep inside of you that is not yet connected to the outside world. It is decision after decision after decision in the right direction; it is discipline. I wish we all had such noble intentions and strength of character, but that's not the world in which we live. It's not the world in which I live. That's for sure.

Start with the new wine, and change is joy. It's inspiring. It's encouraging. You look around and see all of the things you want to live up to, and settling back into the way things used to be feels like such a waste. You're inspired to be better. You yearn to be better. You smile because you see that things are getting better, and when you look in the mirror...perhaps you are, too.